Extreme Fear by Jeff Wise: review

Fortune, it is alleged, favours the brave. As a lifelong member of the League of Cowards, I wouldn’t know. Running a mile at the sniff of danger is second nature to me. I’ve never skied, been on a thrill ride, attempted a rock face, floated in a hot-air balloon, or tried white-water kayaking. I have a friend who cave dives, and just listening to him enthuse about it is enough to make me feel nauseous with terror.

Jeff Wise is a different species of journalist. He specialises in what he calls 'the adrenalin-cranking assignment’, which means he cannot see a ridiculously raging river without wanting to bounce along it. Show him a cave and he’ll go down it, a plane and he’ll fling himself out of it, a gorge and he’ll bungee jump into it. All in all, he’s just the man to investigate the nature of fear and how it is generated.

His method is to cut artfully between an assortment of his own and other people’s terrifying experiences and the science that informs them. He volunteers to skydive so that his fear response can be measured by Dr Lilliane R Mujica-Parodi (her name would be enough to make me anxious). He shows how a degree of fear can increase brain efficiency and optimise performance; illustrating how this can go too far with a cheery story about an amateur pilot steering his plane into the side of a building on New York’s East River.

Inevitably there is a fair measure of neuro-jargon, as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex grapples with the amygdala which activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. But Wise keeps the technicalities under tight control and it is not long before another tale of reckless bravado or gibbering panic unfolds. A Russian doctor stuck in the Antarctic winter cuts his own appendix out. A young female scientist persuades a starving mountain lion to desist from eating her long enough to stab the wretched beast in the eye with a pair of forceps. A cave diver perishes in some horrible dark hole after convincing himself, quite wrongly, that his air has run out.

One moral of Wise’s story is that we need fear. Those who train themselves to be literally fearless – kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers – make themselves capable of unspeakable crimes. Another (a reassurance to this reviewer) is that you may be better off lucky than brave.

One of Wise’s most extraordinary case studies is of the pilot Chesley Sullenberger, who safely ditched a US Airways airliner in the Hudson River almost exactly a year ago. Not only had Sullenberger stacked up 30,000 flying hours, he was an acknowledged expert on dealing with critical danger and a lecturer at the Centre of Catastrophic Management in California. He had trained himself to deal with fear, and when the moment came he was able to display truly superhuman nerve and skill. The remaining 154 people on the plane were just lucky.